Parable of the Sower

I'm fascinated by shows such as "The Walking Dead" and the BBC's 2008 "Survivors," which is about the small fraction of the population who remain after a man-made virus wipes out 99.9 percent of humanity. These shows create circumstances favorable to psychopaths (he who kills without hesitation has an advantage over anyone with a conscience), and put good people in the position of having to decide how best to use force in order to stay alive without killing their own humanity.

The Parable of the Sower is in a similar vein, but it's more realistic than the two shows I mentioned. There's no pandemic and no zombies. The "big bad" is a societal collapse in the US caused by climate change and corrupt and inept government. Society has become stratified into the super-rich, who we never see in the novel, except for a mention of them flying around in helicopters; "middle class" people who have jobs but who are barely scraping by, who are forced to grow much of their own much food, and who live in improvised walled communities comprising a few houses or part of a neighborhood; people who are essentially enslaved by corporations; and the mass of humanity who are starving or killing themselves with drugs.

A sheriff's badge is a license to steal. At best the police will show up late and charge you a fortune. (Everything is privatized; water costs more than gasoline, and no one can afford gasoline as well as water.) The police are just another gang. States have hardened their borders against influxes of refugees from other parts of the country. In effect there only nominally a United States. (Still, the US government has a Mars program!)

The book is the journal of Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl whose father is a preacher and a college professor with a PhD. Her stepmother also holds a PhD. This means they are middle class, which means they are poor. The Olaminas live with a number of other families who are barely getting by, in a walled community trying to defend themselves against raids by the hordes of the desperate poor that live around them.

At age 16, Lauren, seeing that everything is getting worse, knows that her community is doomed, and secretly plans to hit the road as soon as she turns 18. As it happens, her community is wiped out before she can make her planned departure. She and two other survivors hit the road with the hope of finding somewhere better up north. Unfortunately, so are many thousands of other people, many of them with evil intentions, and many of them taking drugs that drive them to violent acts.

This is a story about good people gathering together for safety, trying to defend themselves against the desperate and the evil. How to decide who to trust? Lauren's group grows slowly but steadily.

This story is about people who hold onto a shred of hope in a society that seems hopeless. This resonates today.

The Parable of the Sower opens in 2024. Butler even has a president whose slogan is "Make America Great Again." It was written in 1993. It's all too believable as a portrait of societal collapse.

The extract from Lauren's writings (a compilation of poems and reflections she calls "The Book of the Living") is the nucleus of her religion: Earthseed. She says she hasn't invented this religion, but discovered it through observation.

Change is everything. But we can choose how we interact with this constantly changing world. And what we change changes us. This is a teaching on karma.

Lauren has the long-term aim of getting humanity to the stars. On one level that's a ridiculous notion. Even the US's remaining space program is likely to be scrapped by the next president. Lauren's first step toward that goal is simply to establish a Earthseed community, growing its own food and protecting itself from the world. Even that is monumentally ambitious in the time she inhabits. As I said, this is a book about hope.

Does Lauren ever make it to the stars? I don't know. There are two Earthseed books, and I plan to start on the second, "The Parable of the Talents," as soon as possible. There was to be a third book, but alas Butler never got the chance to write it.

The title is a reference to the new testament parable of someone sowing seeds, with some of them falling on stony ground, or being outgrown by thorns, yet others landing in fertile soil. Hope is a kind of soil in which many things can live. We need to have hope, but we also need to plant seeds in it, and to tend them as they grow.

Which feels like a cheesy thing to say in a review about dystopian fiction, but I genuinely didn't realize this book was published in the year 1993 until I read Butler's biography at the back and realized she passed away in 2006. It feels... pertinent

Others have said this is a pretty grim novel. I agree. It hurt to read, quite often. I feel like I've mostly moved out of my dystopian fiction era but this one hooked me a lot harder than most I've read. I haven't finished a book this quickly in quite a while.

I think Parable of the Sower has a lot to say about eco-fatalism, as well as the many "fatalisms" of neoliberalism in general, which it delivers on very well. I also felt like it would have a lot to say about the value of religion, divorced from the way people in my life and I suspect many others in the west tend to equate religion with Christianity. It delivered on the former part, but not so much the latter in my opinion. Still very compelling, and very well written nonetheless.

Cuando estaba más joven la ficción y la ciencia ficción eran espacios que me hacían sentido para conectar con la imaginación y con la posibilidad de pensar y sentir la vida fuera de límites que percibía en mis presentes.

Como estos ámbitos de la literatura no resonaban tanto en algunas de mis redes cercanas, me alejé un poquito de éstos por algunos años y me metí a libros más teóricos y "serios". Pero desde que empecé a leer a Octavia Butler volví a interesarme por textos de (ciencia) ficción.

Octavia reflexionó sobre la ausencia/invisibilización de mujeres negras en un contexto donde predominaba una ciencia ficción de escritores hombres y blancos. También propuso escenarios que abordaran los pasados-presentes-futuros y que estimularan la imaginación y la creatividad como posibilidades ante las crisis que seguimos viviendo.

En Parable of the sower, Octavia tejió temas como: sensibilidad hacia otrxs seres; críticas al capitalismo, a las desigualdades socio-económicas, a la explotación y hacia la crisis climática; formas de construir relaciones y comunidades basadas en el reconocimiento mutuo; cercanías y comprensiones diversas con la tierra y la sostenibilidad de la vida (entre muchas otras cosillas).

Algo que me parece muy curioso, es la manera en que Octavia toma aspectos del libro, que como lectora me estuvieron haciendo cierto ruido de forma muy sutil, y los hace evidentes en la secuela (Parable of the talents). Creo que no es sencillo plantear todo un imaginario y luego construir una narrativa que lo replantee o que muestre sus matices, al menos de forma convincente. Por eso, aunque Parable of the sower es un libro que aprecié haber leído, verlo de la mano con Parable of the talents fue aún más apreciable para mí.